Martin Armstrong Discussion

[iamnotback]

FOFOA once wrote a piece claiming that gold is one of the very few things with a constant marginal utility.  I explored that idea at a blog piece I wrote years ago.  My contention is that gold has a very slightly declining marginal utility, that the 100th ounce bought has less marginal utility than the first, but performs much better than the 100th BMW car...

Almost everything has a marginal utility that is less than gold.

I even postulated that the marginal utility of gold followed the ln(x) curve.  I got some nice comments on that piece!

Note Bitcoin has a higher marginal utility than gold, because it is a more ideal money. I quoted upthread Nash's explanation of why gold is inferior.

You're correct:

The value is ultimate power. That is what it has always been about for the elite. They don't need money. They use money as a tool for power. Money (even gold) has a declining marginal utility, so the only thing left to pursue is either knowledge or power both of which can be insatiable. The fungible money crowd pursues power. This is why when someone gets too rich, they go insane.

The reason FOFOA is incorrect about his claim that gold has a constant marginal utility is because fungible money doesn't have constant marginal utility. For example, one can't buy creativity with money, as my Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance essay explained. This infuriates the elite of fungible money, so they lust for power in the hopes that they can ameliorate the value of knowledge.

Note Bitcoin has a higher marginal utility than gold, because it is a more ideal money. I quoted upthread Nash's explanation of why gold is inferior.

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[CoinCube]

@CoinCube, haven't you heard the wisdom, "no pain, no gain".  

If I can't feel it in my grubby hands, then it ain't cool enough to be real money.  

Btw, check out the math I found which unequivocally proves that Bitcoin is evil. The correspondence to the predictions in Revelation is somewhat disturbing.

I tend to think of Bitcoin as just an incremental improvement in a long line of incremental improvements. Something that will have its time in the sun and eventually be surpassed by yet another incremental improvement.    

http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-9-the-story-of-value/

In its several-thousand-year history, money has gone through an ever-accelerating evolution in its form. The first stage was commodity money — grain, oil, cattle, metal, and many other things — that functioned as media of exchange without possessing any fiduciary value. This stage lasted several millennia. The next step was coinage, which added fiduciarity to the intrinsic metallic value of silver and gold. Money consisted then of two components: a material and a symbolic.

It was quite natural that eventually the symbol would become detached from the metal, which is what happened with the advent of credit money in the Middle Ages and even before. In China, the first paper money (which was actually a kind of bank draft) was in use by the ninth century and circulated as far as Persia. (1) In the Arab world, a form of check was in wide use around that time as well. Italian traders used bills of exchange as early as the twelfth century, a practice that spread rapidly and was followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century by fractional-reserve banking.(2) This was a major innovation, since it freed the money supply from the metal supply and allowed it to grow organically in response to economic activity. The detachment of money from metal was gradual. During the fractional-reserve banking era, which lasted several centuries, bank notes were still, at least in theory, backed by metal.

Today the era of fractional-reserve banking is over, and money has become pure credit. This is not widely recognized. Many authorities, including most economics textbooks and the Federal Reserve itself, (3) still maintain the pretense that reserves are a limiting factor in money creation, but in practice they almost never are.(4) Banks’ real constraints on money creation are their total capital and their ability to find willing, creditworthy borrowers — that is, those with either uncommitted earning potential or assets to use as collateral. In other words, social agreements govern the creation of money, primary among them the dictum, encoded in interest, that money should go to those who will make even more of it in the future. Today’s money, as I shall explain, is backed by growth; when, as is happening now, growth slows, the entire financial edifice begins to crumble.
...
Some observers, seeing the disastrous consequences of today’s credit-based currencies, advocate a return to the good old days of currencies backed by something tangible, such as gold. They reason that commodity-backed currency would be noninflationary or would eliminate the compulsion for endless growth. I think some of these “hard currency” or “real money” advocates are tapping in to an atavistic desire to return to simpler days, when things were what they were. Dividing the world into two categories, the objectively real and the conventional, they believe that credit-money is an illusion, a lie, that must inevitably collapse with every bust cycle. Actually, this dichotomy is itself an illusion, a construct that reflects deeper mythologies — such as the doctrine of objectivity in physics — that are also breaking down in our time.

The difference between an unbacked and backed currency is not as great as one might suppose. On the face of it, they seem very different: a backed currency derives its value from something real, while an unbacked currency has value only because people agree it does. This is a false distinction: in either case, ultimately what gives money value is the story that surrounds it, a set of social, cultural, and legal conventions.

[tabnloz]

One for Roach

https://sputniknews.com/business/201508161025811280-russia-china-gold-market/

[sidhujag]

@CoinCube, haven't you heard the wisdom, "no pain, no gain".  

If I can't feel it in my grubby hands, then it ain't cool enough to be real money.  

Btw, check out the math I found which unequivocally proves that Bitcoin is evil. The correspondence to the predictions in Revelation is somewhat disturbing.

I tend to think of Bitcoin as just an incremental improvement in a long line of incremental improvements. Something that will have its time in the sun and eventually be surpassed by yet another incremental improvement.    

http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-9-the-story-of-value/

In its several-thousand-year history, money has gone through an ever-accelerating evolution in its form. The first stage was commodity money — grain, oil, cattle, metal, and many other things — that functioned as media of exchange without possessing any fiduciary value. This stage lasted several millennia. The next step was coinage, which added fiduciarity to the intrinsic metallic value of silver and gold. Money consisted then of two components: a material and a symbolic.

It was quite natural that eventually the symbol would become detached from the metal, which is what happened with the advent of credit money in the Middle Ages and even before. In China, the first paper money (which was actually a kind of bank draft) was in use by the ninth century and circulated as far as Persia. (1) In the Arab world, a form of check was in wide use around that time as well. Italian traders used bills of exchange as early as the twelfth century, a practice that spread rapidly and was followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century by fractional-reserve banking.(2) This was a major innovation, since it freed the money supply from the metal supply and allowed it to grow organically in response to economic activity. The detachment of money from metal was gradual. During the fractional-reserve banking era, which lasted several centuries, bank notes were still, at least in theory, backed by metal.

Today the era of fractional-reserve banking is over, and money has become pure credit. This is not widely recognized. Many authorities, including most economics textbooks and the Federal Reserve itself, (3) still maintain the pretense that reserves are a limiting factor in money creation, but in practice they almost never are.(4) Banks’ real constraints on money creation are their total capital and their ability to find willing, creditworthy borrowers — that is, those with either uncommitted earning potential or assets to use as collateral. In other words, social agreements govern the creation of money, primary among them the dictum, encoded in interest, that money should go to those who will make even more of it in the future. Today’s money, as I shall explain, is backed by growth; when, as is happening now, growth slows, the entire financial edifice begins to crumble.
...
Some observers, seeing the disastrous consequences of today’s credit-based currencies, advocate a return to the good old days of currencies backed by something tangible, such as gold. They reason that commodity-backed currency would be noninflationary or would eliminate the compulsion for endless growth. I think some of these “hard currency” or “real money” advocates are tapping in to an atavistic desire to return to simpler days, when things were what they were. Dividing the world into two categories, the objectively real and the conventional, they believe that credit-money is an illusion, a lie, that must inevitably collapse with every bust cycle. Actually, this dichotomy is itself an illusion, a construct that reflects deeper mythologies — such as the doctrine of objectivity in physics — that are also breaking down in our time.

The difference between an unbacked and backed currency is not as great as one might suppose. On the face of it, they seem very different: a backed currency derives its value from something real, while an unbacked currency has value only because people agree it does. This is a false distinction: in either case, ultimately what gives money value is the story that surrounds it, a set of social, cultural, and legal conventions.

The idea of asymptotically ideal money

[r0ach]

If a metal based monetary system cannot prevent recurrent debasement of the unit of measurement either via direct physical debasement or via the addition of financial paper instruments then it has failed as a sound monetary system.

False premise.  You claim debasement actually does anything.  It doesn't.  Debasement is just a lone actor thinking he can fool the market, but it's not possible.  The market always routes right around it and adjusts accordingly.  The market values by metal weight and content.  The only reason Martin Scamstrong makes the false claims he does is because nobody had any equipment to test metals back then and had to rely solely on a maker's mark.

You no longer have to rely on a maker's mark at all.  Metals were ironically not a trust free system in their mainstream hayday, but they are now.  If anything, metals as a trust free money have actually improved, not worsened.  You can even hold up a cell phone and do a ping test on a coin now and have your android app validate if the frequency was legit or not.  Tools like that were not available to the common man back in the day, so he was essentially just using fiat.  Thus everything abut Armstrong's premise is wrong.

[OROBTC]

URGENT: buy LTC immediately!

And THAT call, friends, is one of the best market-timing calls I have ever seen.

LTC is up some 22% + just today (5 April), since (late in the day) March 30 (iamnotback's message posted) LTC is up +/- 50%.  If you look at just before the price spike on March 30, LTC is up about 100%...

Nice prediction.  50% is a huge move in just days.

See for yourself at ounce.me, click the blue & white graph logo next to LTC price.

[OROBTC]

...

Quick graphs & comments on marginal utility.

Graph from wikipedia re marginal and total utility for "most products":



Note that at about 7 products (perhaps Mercedes cars), you get no happier, you have to maintain those cars...  Note that marginal utility goes to zero and then NEGATIVE utility for Car No. 8.


Here was my proposal as to how gold works re marginal utility:



Total utility would follow (or approximately follow) the ln(x) curve, ounces of gold own greater than one.  Note gold would always have a positive marginal utility.  FOFOA proposes that gold would always have a CONSTANT marginal utility (that the 40th ounce would yield as much marginal utility as your first or second ounce).  That does not accord with my experience, my 40th ounce yielded a positive marginal utility, but not as much as the second, third or fourth.

[r0ach]

http://www.trueactivist.com/dutch-media-cancels-dr-phil-show-after-exposing-elite-pedophilia-ring/

[r0ach]

Another spectacular Armstrong failure:

[Shakfrek]

good to see some people here are finally getting it. Martin Armstrong is a scamster and a cheap charlatan. All he does is taking money from idiots like @iamnotback in exchange for bs. That's it.
 
In addition to claiming to be a forecaster, trader, programmer, historian, physicist, seismologist, expert in government, politics, and so much else this charlatan is now in a new business. He now all of a sudden is... drum roll... a constitutional lawyer https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/north_america/americas-current-economy/does-it-matter-if-you-are-born-outside-usa-to-be-president/. I mean this conman could not even manage to get into a community college, never did anything in his life but cheating, lying and spreading bs on his amateurish blog and conferences.

He claims that he has something like NASA+IMF but in reality it's just a one man show. It's just him. No employees, no offices, and of course no super computer. The charlatan is totally incompetent, broke and just  desperate for someone else's money. Sound familiar? The Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz, an ordinary conman.

I do find funny when he posts people's "questions" to him.  Clearly written by him for him to respond to himself!  "Mr. Armstrong you are the most amazing thing I have ever encountered, certainly the most brilliant man in our galaxy.  Can you please take my puny gratitude to your super computer and accept me as a devoted moron?" LOL!

[r0ach]

Why the US is going to war with Syria was already explained years ago:

[r0ach]

Found the smoking gun, a news story from 2013 that they have now deleted but can still be found using the wayback machine archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130129213824/http:/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270219/U-S-planned-launch-chemical-weapon-attack-Syria-blame-Assad.html

[sloanf]

I do find funny when he posts people's "questions" to him.  Clearly written by him for him to respond to himself!  "Mr. Armstrong you are the most amazing thing I have ever encountered, certainly the most brilliant man in our galaxy.  Can you please take my puny gratitude to your super computer and accept me as a devoted moron?" LOL!

yes, I described it earlier in my post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082909.msg13669214#msg13669214. And in the end of every post there is always "buy my conferences" where he (uneducated broke and delusional clown who spent ten years in jail, achieved nothing in life, etc, etc) promises to explain in detail how to solve all the problems in the world, reveal how the universe works and so on.

[DigiLab]

@iamnotback, I'm not following this thread on a regular basis, but as I find time in between. Having said that, man, you are not easy to follow. Since your concepts are advanced, coupled with the rapid speed you are bringing them up.
Now, I can not remember where exactly, but somewhere you had a paper, about entropy, gravity, something in that fashion. And I think there was some discussion below it as well. I didn't save it at the time (to read it later), and now I can not find it. And man, do I want to read it. If possible can you pls provide a link to that writing of yours. It would be much appreciated.
p.s. If there is a single place, or maybe two, where most of your writings can be found, pls provide link(s) for that as well.

[iamnotback]

@iamnotback, I'm not following this thread on a regular basis, but as I find time in between. Having said that, man, you are not easy to follow. Since your concepts are advanced, coupled with the rapid speed you are bringing them up.
Now, I can not remember where exactly, but somewhere you had a paper, about entropy, gravity, something in that fashion. And I think there was some discussion below it as well. I didn't save it at the time (to read it later), and now I can not find it. And man, do I want to read it. If possible can you pls provide a link to that writing of yours. It would be much appreciated.
p.s. If there is a single place, or maybe two, where most of your writings can be found, pls provide link(s) for that as well.

It is on my steemit @anonymint. Also I wrote more about that recently in the thread where I discuss the following.

Very strong circumstantial evidence that John Nash was Satoshi Nakamoto!

Read this!


Also @miscreanity has something important from Armstrong today in the above linked thread.

[DigiLab]

@iamnotback, found it, thank You very much. There's other stuff as well, feeling like a kid in a candy store.
I'll read the provided links as well. Keep up the good work.

[iamnotback]

I highly suggest everyone read this following page of this thread, as it if very important for your understanding of blockchains and crypto-currency:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1860406.msg18506101#msg18506101

[iamnotback]

I suggest buying LTC now!

Re: Snapchat first investor thinks bitcoin could realistically be worth $500,000

According to Jeremy Liew, the first investor in Snapchat, and Blockchain CEO and cofounder Peter Smith. In a presentation sent to Business Insider, the duo laid out their case for why it's reasonable for bitcoin to explode to $500,000 by 2030.

A very interesting article at Business Insider that worth reading: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-could-be-500000-by-2030-first-snapchat-investor-says-2017-3

I originally thought BTC might top out below $50k.

But now that I understand that BTC will be exclusively only the settlement layer for the mass scaling which will take place in altcoins, I now think his analysis may be correct.

All the power broker settlement will likely to be on the Bitcoin blockchain which will be the bulk of the fungible capital generated by the masses on the altcoins as dictated by the power-law (Zipf's law) distribution of wealth. Thus Bitcoin is the reserve currency of all the altcoins.

This is why one must stay invested in this sector. Note I do think the altcoins that scale up the masses will see faster appreciation than BTC in spurts, so that is one of way of increasing one's BTC if you are expert at speculation. Otherwise buy and hodl BTC.

[sidhujag]

Im bearish LTC until sub $1 but i would buy segwit coins that are merge mined. Much profit.

[OROBTC]

...

Armstrong comes out strong against The Left and the European Superstate in two of his pieces.

Expect The Left in Europe to at least as aggressive as they are here in the USA:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/civil-unrest/the-left-becoming-violent-in-france-as-they-did-against-trump/

In the case above, it is Corsica...  The regions in Europe may have more unrest in the difficult times to come.

Euroskeptic Nigel Farage let's 'em have it:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/europes-current-economy/farage-tells-the-eu-they-are-acting-like-mafia/